Keywords and how to use them

I recently sent off an email to Masterchef contestant Stacie Stewart and I suddenly realised what a minefield the internet is and how difficult it is to get started up if your essentially a novice.

A lot of people think that just by having a website people will visit your delicately crafted home on the internet, but thats just not true. To run a successful website it can take a lot of effort and time.

So with that in mind heres a few tips to get you started.

Statistic monitoring.

One of the most important things to when you first start your site is monitoring where your visitors are coming from. You can install invisible tracking to through either Google Analytics, or my favourite Statcounter.

This will allow you to see exactly how people are arriving at your site. If they’re clicking through links on other sites or if they’re searching on Google for particular search terms. These search terms are known as ‘Keywords’.

Keywords are really important and can identify visitor trends and help you to find new areas which you can expand into.

To install statistic counters you’ll have to go into the code of your site to install it or if your using a wordpress site download a plugin.

How to target keywords.

If your aiming to rank number one for any Christmas related keywords you need to start targeting your site towards this in August! I know it seems like a long time but you need a long lead in time when it comes to SEO.

Your SEO efforts build up over time rather than it being an instant result, also you need to accumulate enough content on your site to be considered an ‘authority’ on a particular topic.

A good place to start looking for potential keywords is in your statistics, have a look at what people are already searching for and note it down as a potential keyword to target.

You can expand upon these initial results by using Google keywords. Google keywords will help you to find potentially related keywords that you can rank for and show you how competitive the terms your trying to rank for are.

Another thing you might want to consider is ‘long tail keywords’, these are usually phrases rather than individual words. Long tail keywords are usually easier to rank highly for but typically have a lower search volume.

How to use keywords.

So once you’ve drafted your list of keywords or phrases you want to rank for, I’d recommend trying to keep this list to about 10-20 words. These are the keywords your going to try and rank for. Again you won’t see an immediate return for your efforts but over time it’ll accumulate.

Keywords are primarily used in the meta date for your site, meta information is located in the header of the site in the source code. You can either manually enter this information yourself or use a plugin like ‘All In One SEO’ for Wordpress.

Meta information for every page of your site should be different.

You need to decide what the keywords from your selected list best reflect the information on the page. You can of course pick up new keywords from the content contained within the article of your site. Your keywords need to be relevant to your articles!

Another good practice is to include a keyword as part of the title of your article and in the URL. Including keywords into your URLs will result in them being deemed more relevant and be picked up more highly in searches. Many content management systems have an option to convert your blog entry titles into URLs automatically.

The final tip I have is for writing articles for your site. Your natural instinct for writing an article will be to combine many topics into one post but don’t do it! If you want to successfully target you should stick to one topic per post and also mention whatever is your chosen keyword three times for it to become indexed.

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